"Haiku, the open source re-creation of BeOS, threatens to become 'The Duke Nukem of operating systems', joked long-time contributor Ryan Leavengood. Actually, after eleven years of development, Haiku still falls four years short of Duke Nukem Forever's long delay, but few other projects have been so long in development. However, with the recent release of Alpha 4.1, Haiku is at last nearing general release." 2013 is going to be very exciting for Haiku.

The Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel and doesn't fit well into the BeOS micro-kernel mold.

NewOS was a near-perfect fit.

Audio, networking, even screen-drawing are user-mode activities. The kernel just gets a basic environment setup and handles the earliest stages of identification.

The Linux kernel would have had to be heavily butchered and altered to the point of no longer being Linux for this to work.

That takes time and man-power, the NewOS kernel was almost already compatible as it was and there was no need for the kernel ABI to be wholly compatible with BeOS since Haiku was re-writing all of the servers and drivers as well.